text: Nasa's Curiosity Rover is seen wiggling its wheels back and fourth during final checks before it sets off across the surface of Mars. Engineers at mission control have been running a series of tests before the one-ton vehicle's first drive which is expected in the next couple of days. The images were taken by one of Curiosity's navigation cameras. Curiosity, a six-wheeled . vehicle the size of a compact car, landed inside a vast, ancient impact . crater near Mars' equator on August 6 after an eight-month, . 354-million-mile voyage through space. Scroll down for video . Handling's out of this world: Nasa's Curiosity Rovers tests its steering during final checks before it sets off across the surface of Mars . Nasa's Curiosity rover has unfurled its robotic arm for the first time as scientists continue to tests its systems. The numbers around the edge are degrees of the compass and degrees below or above horizontal. The seven foot long robot arm contain a plethora of instruments, including: . A camera to capture images for analysis . A drill to get under the martian surface . A spectrometer to analyse samples . A scoop and mechanisms for sieving and portioning samples of powdered martian rock and soil . Earlier the Martian motor was shown . flexing its extending robotic arm for the first time. The 7-foot-long . (2.1-meter-long) arm maneuvers a turret of tools including a camera, a . drill, a spectrometer, a scoop and mechanisms for sieving and portioning . samples of powdered rock and soil. The view (above)is a mosaic of low-resolution thumbnail images returned to Earth a few hours after the activity on Mars, with higher resolution versions set to follow. Curiosity landed on Mars two weeks ago to begin a two-year mission using . 10 instruments to assess whether a carefully chosen study area inside . Gale Crater has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for . microbial life. The Mars rover Curiosity zapped its first rock on Sunday with a high-powered laser gun designed to analyze Martian mineral content, and scientists declared their target practice a success. The robotic science lab aimed its laser beam at the fist-sized stone nearby and shot the rock with 30 pulses over a 10-second period, NASA said in a statement issued from mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles. Each pulse delivers more than 1 million watts of energy for about five one-billionths of a second, vapourising a pinhead-sized bit of the rock to create a tiny spark, which is analyzed by a small telescope mounted on the instrument. The ionized glow, which can be . observed and recorded from up to 25 feet away, is then split into its . component wavelengths by three spectrometers that give scientists . information about the chemical makeup of the target rock. Curiosity has begun its science mission on Mars by 'zapping' a rock with its laser analysis equipment . The combined system, called the Chemistry-and-Camera instrument, or ChemCam, is capable of discerning more than 6,000 different wavelengths in the ultraviolet, infrared and visible light spectrum and is designed to take about 14,000 measurements throughout Curiosity's Mars mission. The purpose of Sunday's initial use of the laser, conducted at roughly 3 a.m. Pacific time (7.00 a.m. EDT), was as 'target practice' for the instrument. But scientists will examine the data they receive to determine composition of the rock, which they dubbed 'Coronation,' NASA said. 'We got a great spectrum of Coronation - lots of signal,' said ChemCam principal investigator Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the instrument was developed. 'After eight years of building the instrument, it's payoff time.' Curiosity's two-year mission is aimed at determining whether or not the planet most like Earth could have hosted microbial life. The first laser test by the Chemistry and Camera, or ChemCam, instrument aboard NASA's Curiosity Mars rover. The square inset is further magnified and processed to show the difference between images taken before and after the test . The rover's primary target is Mount Sharp, a towering mound of layered rock rising from the floor of Gale Crater. But mission controllers are gradually checking out Curiosity's sophisticated array of instruments before sending it on its first road trip across the Martian landscape. The $2.5 billion Curiosity project marks NASA's first astrobiology mission since the Viking probes to Mars during the 1970s and the most advanced robotic science lab sent to another world. The technique employed by ChemCam has been used to examine the composition of materials in other extreme environments, such as inside nuclear reactors and on the sea floor. Curiosity rover has also sent back its sharpest image of the 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain, called Mount Sharp . The technology also has experimental applications in environmental monitoring and cancer detection. But Sunday's exercise, conducted during Curiosity's 13th full day on Mars, was the first use in interplanetary exploration, NASA said. Before Curiosity embarks on its 4.3-mile (7-km) trek to the foot of Mount Sharp, a journey that could take six months, mission controllers plan to send it out on a shorter jaunt to a spot 1,600 feet from its landing site. The deck of the Curiosity  rover from the rover's Navigation camera. The back of the rover can be seen at the top left of the image, and two of the rover's right side wheels can be seen on the left . VIDEO: See Curiosity on the red planet as it prepares for target practice...